America’s military revolution

The Bush administration is shifting the direction of US strategic thinking.
Priority will be given to the technological race and to the development and
deployment of flexible, hi-tech forces capable of intervening anywhere in the
world, to ensure the lasting primacy of US armed forces.

Soon after his election last year, President George W Bush asked his defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld to “challenge the status quo inside the Pentagon [and] to develop a [United States] strategy necessary to have a force equipped for warfare of the 21st century” (1). If the details of the Pentagon’s new strategic blueprint are not yet clear, it is, however, possible to describe its underlying principles.

The strategy being developed by the Bush administration will rest on three fundamental precepts: America-centrism, meaning that any deployment of US military forces abroad - whether or not in conjunction with US allies - must above all serve American interests; global reach, i.e. the ability to project US military power to any point on the globe, at any time and under any circumstances; and perpetual supremacy, meaning the application of science, technology and money to ensure that US forces and weapons will always be superior to those of all other nations.

These are not, of course, entirely new ideas. Other US administrations have favoured one or other of these principles. But never have these precepts been articulated with such consistency and fervour - to the point that they represent a new and important departure in American strategic thinking.

US military policy, like that of any nation, has always been based on the premise that the employment of US forces abroad must serve fundamental American security interests. But US interests also included the pursuit of other, more lofty objectives - the defence of democracy against the spread of totalitarianism, cohesion of the Western alliance system, preservation of regional stability and so on. These objectives have not entirely disappeared under Bush, but they are being pushed aside by an explicit emphasis on the pursuit of America’s own national interests.

US leaders argue that the West no longer faces an overarching threat like that once posed by the Soviet Union, so there is no compelling reason (...)

(6) Transcript of testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Washington, DC, 11 January 2001, as transcribed by the Federal News Service and posted on the Congressional Information Service website, web.lexis-nexis.com